The Apprentice?

 

We've covered Bill Shatner's 1958-60 stint performing in the theatrical play The World of Suzie Wong a number of times. But it turns out that far more photographs exist from this time - ones of significant toupological interest. For example, while perusing Marc Cushman's These Are The Voyages books we came across a publicity still from 1958 or '59 featuring Bill Shatner and co-star France Nuyen:

The picture is of a very low resolution, but nonetheless we'd say it is pretty certain Bill Shatner is toupless here - combing, spraying and creating a shell that could still pass as a full head of hair if photographed correctly. Perusing a couple of Internet photo-sharing sites and message boards, we also came across another picture from the same shoot - apparently taken by photographer Milton H. Greene on October 14, 1958:

 

Here, the thinning is more evident. Indeed, the sides of Bill Shatner's hair appear noticeably fuller and of a greater volume than the hair atop the scalp.

 

Let's quickly refresh our memories about the play in question: according to the IBDB, The World of Suzie Wong had two separate runs on Broadway, New York. The first was at the Broadhurst Theatre from October 14, 1958 to November 7, 1959; the second run, at the George Abbott Theatre, ran from November 9, 1959 to January 2, 1960. 

Source: Film Score Monthly message board 

The story, set in Hong Kong, sees serviceman Robert Lomax (Shatner) falling for a local prostitute (Nuyen). In his autobiography, Up Till Now, Bill Shatner relates how, following initial disastrous reviews, he altered his acting style and helped re-imagine the play as a satire - which then became a hit (more in our toupological analysis)!

We also know that on November 16, 1958, Bill Shatner and France Nuyen performed an extract from the play (presumably still the "bad" version) on live television, on the Ed Sullivan Show. No footage of this has ever been seen publicly since the original transmission (but certainly such a performance would have been cause to take numerous publicity stills). 

 

The Suzie Wong era is of particular interest because it serves as a unique example of us seemingly having pictures of Bill Shatner both toupless and wearing a very early approximation of a "Jim Kirk Lace". A common reference point! Over the span of the play's almost 15 month run, it appears that Bill Shatner's real hair became increasingly thin to the point that - at least for certain (perhaps later) publicity stills - a toupee began to be viewed as essential. So we have what is, we think, almost certainly a toup: 

...also this quintessentially "Jim Kirk lace" 1959 television interview on the The Dick Clark Saturday Night Beechnut Show:

And also likely not toup:

closer...

See also here for a Life magazine feature published on October 8, 1958 (thus prior to the premiere) which appears to show that at this point, Bill Shatner was still toupless, but using heavy thickening spray of some kind:

 

Finally, with greater certainty, almost certainly no toup:

But wait, there's more! - as they say in infomercials.

 

What if there was a brief intermediary phase, considered, but soon discarded? We've never encountered a Bill Shatner photograph that appears to be a comb-over before. But this is what we appear to have in another Wong publicity picture we came across (the date it was taken is not known by us). Something akin to "The Donald's" solution (we believe him when he says it's not a toup):

Source: Daily Mail

Could it be that Bill Shatner briefly attempted this method too? Clever combing forward of long hair from the back?

 

The hair just doesn't appear to be following a natural growth/combing pattern here. Rather, it appears to have been swept forward. The frontal hairline also appears to be showing signs of severe thinning. Perhaps the hair was squashed by a since-removed toup. Or perhaps it really is some sort of comb-over attempt. There do appear to be bald patches visible through the carefully placed strands in places rarely seen by the general public. 

Just when you start to think that all the toupological stones have been uncovered something like this comes along...

An early "Jim".

Not long ago, as part of our toupological analysis, we presented a series of photos from Bill Shatner's appearance in the 1958-59 play The World of Suzie Wong. Our conclusion was that in some of these pictures, Bill Shatner was either toup-less or only wearing a rear cap-like piece. Meanwhile, in other pictures, Bill Shatner looked like he was wearing a full frontal piece. Since the play ran for fourteen months, our (speculative) conclusion was that early publicity photos showed Bill Shatner's real frontal hairline, while later pictures did not - it was evidently a time of great toupological experimentation for young Bill.


Now, thanks to the good folks at My Star Trek Scrapbook, we have another picture of Bill Shatner's performance in the play - and in this case, the actor almost certainly appears to be wearing a full early version of the "Jim Kirk lace". Since most decent theaters had and have large collections of hairpieces for both men and women, it is possible that this early "Jim" is not custom-made for the actor, but rather a hastily-chosen stage wig. The excessive thickness of the frontal hairline, along with a generally awkward, bulky shape suggest a cheaper piece. Whether this was, instead, Bill Shatner's own recently-purchased very first toupee, we can't say...

The World of Suzie Wong - a toupological analysis.

Normally, when the William Shatner School of Toupological Studies conducts a full toupological analysis, we watch the movie or TV episode that we are studying. In the case of the 1958-59 Broadway production of The World of Suzie Wong, that is sadly impossible. But instead, the folks at "The Department of Transfollicular and Metatoupular Archeology" (located in Building 35C, Floor 24, Unit 7, Section R, rooms 1123-2275 of the WSSTS) have provided us with the next best thing - some exclusive pictures from the production to help guide us. The images are from an original program of the production - and many have possibly never been presented on the Internet before.


First, a little background on the production from Bill Shatner himself, courtesy of his autobiography Up Till Now: "[My wife] Gloria and I moved back to New York and we bought a little house in Hastings-on-Hudson for nineteen-thousand dollars. This was an amazing step for me, this was roots...I was confident I could afford it, I was going to be paid $750 a week to star in a Broadway show. That was a tremendous amount of money in 1958."

Explaining the plot of that Broadway show, Bill Shatner recalls: "The World of Suzie Wong was a love story set in Hong Kong. I played a Canadian artist who falls in love with a Chinese prostitute and tries to reform her."

Bill Shatner sits (center-left) opposite France Nuyen.

But excitement soon turned to despair: "I don't remember precisely when I knew The World of Suzie Wong was going to be a complete disaster...We opened to universally tepid reviews. If theater groups hadn't been invented we would have closed the next morning, but we were sold out for three months..."


Members of the audience would leave mid-show, while behind-the-scenes, co-star France Nuyen threatened to stop speaking mid-performance should she catch sight of the play's director, whom she detested. It wasn't long before she carried out her threat. A desperate Bill Shatner had an idea: "I began to speed up lines. I changed the intonation and emotion. Just by speaking faster and putting emphasis on different words I shortened the play by fifteen minutes - and people began to laugh. I love you, had become, I love you? We were making fun of this turgid melodrama. We turned it into a lighthearted comedy. The show became a hit."


The World of Suzie Wong ultimately ran for fourteen months.


By the way, some have speculated that the birth of Bill Shatner's unique pause-based acting style can be traced to the moment when, through altering his pace and intonation, the actor single-handedly saved the sinking production.


Now, to the hair...


As we've noted previously, Bill Shatner's frontal hairline was very likely still his own at this point - its' round contours are distinctly different from the frontal lace that he started to wear soon after.


We should also add that a lot may have changed from the opening to the close of the play more than a year later. Even from studying the pictures here, it is pretty evident that this was a period of great turbulence and change for Bill Shatner's hair, which was thinning very fast at the front while a bald patch had appeared at the top of the crown. We previously posted a picture from the play, which we believe is a rare example of being able to see a Bill Shatner bald patch:


Yet, this problem is not evident in the pictures within the official program. Perhaps knowing that a photo-shoot was taking place, additional toupological measures were taken. Our guess is that Bill Shatner is indeed wearing a rear-only cap-like toupee in all of the official photos (click here to see a clip from the TV show Cheers to see how these toupees worked).


Similarly, in the below picture, we again see a back-of-the-head style that is too smooth, too full and very much in keeping with the rear component of the later "Jim Kirk lace":


...which looked like this:


Back in Febuary 1957, the rear of Bill Shatner's head was already very, very thin:

Studio One: "The Defender" - click here for more.

Compare that crown area with Bill Shatner in Suzie Wong - it's simply too thick:

Interestingly, one of the genial things about the frontal "Jim Kirk lace" is how much it mirrored Bill Shatner's own swooshy style at the front (while he still had it).



Maybe the frontal lace was also used at some point later in the play's run (or is even used in one or two photos here too) - we don't know. What we do know is that it was soon to become a staple of the more probing scrutiny of TV appearances. And by 1962, the frontal lace was also in use onstage:

A Shot in the Dark

Here's a few more pictures from Suzie Wong (see if you can spot Bill Shatner):

Click on the images below for a profile of Bill Shatner:


An officially sanctioned review of rehearsals for the play:


And a poster:


Click here and here for some other pictures from the production that we previously posted.

And let's end with a gratuitous picture of the very beautiful France Nuyen:

Poll result and more on the lace.

Thanks for voting. One factor that would be very different today would be the press. Were a young William Shatner, star of the ratings hit (today, Star Trek with the very same ratings would be considered a huge hit, in particular because of the way that audience demographics are now factored-in, rather than just straight viewing figures. Back in the 60s, Star Trek had one of the most appealing demographics out there to advertisers - but they hadn't yet switched to using a mechanism that measured this.) known as Star Trek, to be a secret toupee user, the press would have gone out of their way to reveal this. Up until at least the first year of Trek, Bill Shatner was sometimes still going around toup-less when not in the public arena. Today, a young Shatner today would face some very different choices in light of the ever-relentless paparazzi.

***

On a separate note, we welcome some of our newest readers and commenters. One particular issue that commenter "Al" mentioned was that of the frontal lace - arguing that perhaps Bill Shatner's frontal hairline was real during the early phases of toup. We try to be very careful with what and how we assert certain toupee points (for example the current plugs or no plugs debate) but in the case of the frontal lace, we can say with absolute confidence that there is a large body of strong evidence out there that on-screen, Bill Shatner's frontal hairline permanently disappeared behind a toupee around 1958 and has not been seen since (on-stage, it was about a year or so later). While Bill Shatner went bald from the back first, it wasn't long before the front gave out too.

Here's Bill Shatner in 1959 wearing his beloved frontal lace, with its characteristic thick swoosh:

Bill Shatner in CBS's The Story of a Gunfighter (1959)

In the book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, the lace line was described by Star Trek producer Bob Justman thus (see here for more on this book):

"My gaze shifted to his (Shatner's) hairline. Examining balding actors' hairlines was a habit I'd picked up over the years. The 'lace' that anchored the front of his toupee glistened. I made a mental note of it to tell the makeup man about it before we filmed again."

A gust of upward wind highlights the frontal toupee, which was anchored by a v-shaped very thin lace "skin" (visible in high-quality remastered prints) that protruded slightly down along the forehead.

Interestingly, Bill Shatner still had a frontal hairline as late as 1958-1959's New York stage production of The World of Suzie Wong. Indeed, we believe that this may have been the last ever public appearance of Bill Shatner sans toupee - by this time, he was already wearing a toupee on-screen and on-stage touping-up soon followed, perhaps even during the play's (often stressful) two-year run.

Bill Shatner in The World of Suzie Wong late 1958 - early 1959. Still no frontal toup.

Spray, combing or a brief undocumented period of using a rear-only toup? See this clip from Cheers to see how they work.

So, on-screen Bill Shatner started wearing a frontal lace a little earlier than he absolutely needed to. While his hair at the back thinned, the frontal hairline likely remained in some form through to the early 1960s.

If there is one famous person who's pattern of balding appears to match Bill Shatner's, then it is perhaps Britain's Prince William who at 27 actually appears to be about three years more severe in pace than Bill Shatner:

This would probably match Bill Shatner, circa 1960.

This would probably match Bill Shatner circa 1962.

Anyway, we've examined this issue many times at this site - over the festive season, when we won't be posting as much, we'll try to take some time to improve our listing and indexing of old posts in order to make them easier to locate.